Audiophiles Bemoan The End of the Reel
MrPepper11
Tale of the Tape:
Audiophiles Bemoan The End of the Reel
As Quantegy Shuts Plant, Purists Snap Up Supply; NASA Feels the Crunch
By ETHAN SMITH and SARAH MCBRIDE
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Jeff Tweedy, leader of the rock group Wilco, prefers to record music on
reel-to-reel tape rather than on the digital equipment that has
overtaken the music industry. Purists like him think it confers a
warmth and richness to recordings that a computer cannot.
But last Friday, Mr. Tweedy hit a snag as he prepared for a session in
Wilco's Chicago studio space: Nobody could find any of the
professional-grade audio tape the band is accustomed to using. "I was
under the impression that there was a shortage of tape in Chicago," Mr.
Tweedy says.
What he didn't yet realize was that the shortage is global. Quantegy
Inc., which may be the last company in the world still manufacturing
the high-quality tape, abruptly shut down its Opelika, Ala., plant on
Dec. 31, leaving audiophiles in the lurch.
Quantegy filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Monday and hopes
a restructuring will eventually revive its operations. But its future
is uncertain, inasmuch as demand also is dwindling for its videotape.
The news has set off a frantic scramble in the music industry as
producers and studios seek to secure as much Quantegy tape as possible.
By the middle of last week, most suppliers around the country had sold
out their entire stocks of reel-to-reel audio tape.
The supply that remained came at prices rapidly escalating above the
usual $140-per-reel wholesale price of Quantegy 2-inch tape. Walter
Sear, a prominent New York studio owner, quickly snapped up 60 or 70
reels, some at prices that had ballooned by as much as 40%. "We'll have
to change our approach to life without tape," Mr. Sear says.
Quantegy is hearing from customers all over the world trying to secure
the professional-grade tape. A Japanese musician e-mailed from Tokyo,
eager to get more for a recording session. Richard Lindenmuth,
Quantegy's president and chief executive, says he'll try to help. Some
customers are trying to organize their own bailouts of his company.
Andrew Kautz, president of the Society of Professional Audio Recording
Services, called Mr. Lindenmuth Friday hoping to get a one-time special
order, a request Mr. Lindenmuth is considering.
The crunch reaches far beyond the recording industry. The National
Aeronautics and Space Administration uses Quantegy tape on its space
shuttles to record information ranging from pressure to temperature.
This week NASA has been trying to buy 20 reels from Quantegy.
Even Hollywood is affected. Some die-hard moviemakers believe voices
sound better recorded on analog tape. In making "Spider-Man 2" and the
Harry Potter movies, digital recording technology has taken the front
seat, but backups of dialogue were recorded on reels of Quantegy tape.
Engineers are also worried about how long digital recordings will last.
Tape was used to record most music after World War II. In the heyday of
tape recording, it was common for rock bands with big recording budgets
to run through hundreds of reels of tape in making just one album.
But over the past decade, the tape has been rapidly outmoded by
cheaper, more convenient computer-based digital recording. People in
the music industry say that as few as 5% of albums are recorded and
mixed using audio tape.
The purists have a romantic attachment to the taping process. "It's a
much more musical medium than digital could ever dream of being," says
Joe Gastwirt, a mastering engineer who has worked with the Grateful
Dead and others. "It actually does something to the music."
Most of the industry gravitated to the cheaper digital technique,
however, transforming tape from a commodity to a boutique item. That
changeover has wiped out a once-hardy field of competitors. Quantegy
was founded shortly after World War II by John Herbert Orr, a former
Army major who called the company Orradio Industries. Ampex Corp., a
maker of recording equipment, bought Orradio in 1959 and renamed it
Ampex Magnetic Tape.
Over the years, Quantegy went head-to-head with various competitors,
including European brands like Emtec Magnetics and BASF. But as the
market began to fall off, Ampex decided to get out of the tape business
in 1995, and spun off Quantegy that year. As computer technology
overtook the recording industry in the late 1990s, Quantegy's
competitors bailed out. Some tapes are manufactured in China, but audio
professionals generally don't consider them to be of consistently high
quality.
Quantegy's audiotape business in 2004 was still profitable, accounting
for $6 million of the company's $30 million in sales. But the company
fell into trouble because of other obligations and when Quantegy lost
one of its major videotape customers in July, it suffered a cash
crunch. By year's end, it couldn't meet payroll and sent its employees
home. Mr. Lindenmuth believes an injection of $10 million would save
the company, and is hoping a Chapter 11 reorganization will give him
time to find investors.
When Wilco's Mr. Tweedy found himself in a bind, he telephoned Steve
Albini, a Chicago producer and studio owner who is known for his work
with Nirvana and the Pixies. Mr. Albini's Electrical Audio Recording is
one of the last major studios in the country to rely exclusively on
audiotape.
Mr. Albini had been stockpiling tape for more than a year, worried that
the end of manufacturing was near. But when Quantegy closed its doors,
he redoubled his efforts to secure as much as possible. Working through
normal sources, he tracked down around 65 reels, enough to make about
10 albums.
He also began "looking in the weeds," as he puts it. He tracked down
contacts who buy odd lots of electronic equipment on the salvage
market. Through one, Mr. Albini hit the mother lode: nearly 2,000 reels
of 2-inch magnetic tape, enough to fill a small warehouse. Mr. Albini
bought 100 reels and is trying to keep the supplier's name and
whereabouts to himself. He says he doesn't want to see a better-funded
competitor move in on the remaining stock.
Mr. Albini estimates he now has a year's worth of tape, or about 500
reels, on hand. So when Mr. Tweedy called last Friday, Mr. Albini
volunteered two reels of tape -- as "a professional courtesy." But, he
says, "I don't want to go into business supplying tape to people."
Looking ahead to a tape-starved future, Mr. Tweedy has a fallback: The
band has an archive of around 100 reels of tape it has used in
recording its various albums. By splicing out and saving the final
version of each song, he figures they can maintain the archive and also
generate a supply of tapes that can be recycled for future recording
sessions.
Still, Mr. Tweedy jokes, if the tape scarcity continues, even some of
the archived recordings might become expendable. "I'm just fearful that
all the master tapes at the loft would be worth more if they were
blank," he says.
======================================================
Scott Dorsey
>
>Quantegy filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Monday and hopes
>a restructuring will eventually revive its operations. But its future
>is uncertain, inasmuch as demand also is dwindling for its videotape.
This is not accurate, in spite of the AP wire article. Quantegy has yet
to file for Chapter 11. That's not to say that they won't be doing so
at some point.
But the panic began when the front door of the factory was closed and
the workers who arrived in the morning were turned away. This resulted in
an article in a local Alabama paper over the Christmas holidays, which is
when the panic began.
If the shutdown had taken place any time other than over the holidays, the
situation might have been a little different.
>Quantegy is hearing from customers all over the world trying to secure
>the professional-grade tape. A Japanese musician e-mailed from Tokyo,
>eager to get more for a recording session. Richard Lindenmuth,
>Quantegy's president and chief executive, says he'll try to help. Some
>customers are trying to organize their own bailouts of his company.
>Andrew Kautz, president of the Society of Professional Audio Recording
>Services, called Mr. Lindenmuth Friday hoping to get a one-time special
>order, a request Mr. Lindenmuth is considering.
Almost certainly this is an attempt on the part of Quantegy to show how
important their facility is to a potential investor. They have been courting
a buyout for some time now.
>Over the years, Quantegy went head-to-head with various competitors,
>including European brands like Emtec Magnetics and BASF. But as the
>market began to fall off, Ampex decided to get out of the tape business
>in 1995, and spun off Quantegy that year. As computer technology
>overtook the recording industry in the late 1990s, Quantegy's
>competitors bailed out. Some tapes are manufactured in China, but audio
>professionals generally don't consider them to be of consistently high
>quality.
Ummm. Emtec magnetics and BASF were the same organization. Emtec was a
holding company that bought the facility from BASF itself, just as Quantegy
was a holding company that bought the old Orr plant from Ampex.
I do not know of anybody manufacturing 1/4" or wider tape in China.
India and Korea, yes, but not China.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."
Michel Hafner
>The purists have a romantic attachment to the taping process. "It's a
>much more musical medium than digital could ever dream of being," says
>Joe Gastwirt, a mastering engineer who has worked with the Grateful
>Dead and others. "It actually does something to the music.
>
>
The last sentence says it all. I'd rather do 'something' to the music
under my
control, not the medium's, should I feel the need to do 'something'.
![this]@ri.htnet.hr Edi Zubovic's profile photo](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/a/default-user=s40-c)
this]@ri.htnet.hr Edi Zubovic
--------------8<--------------------
>Looking ahead to a tape-starved future, Mr. Tweedy has a fallback: The
>band has an archive of around 100 reels of tape it has used in
>recording its various albums. By splicing out and saving the final
>version of each song, he figures they can maintain the archive and also
>generate a supply of tapes that can be recycled for future recording
>sessions.
>
>Still, Mr. Tweedy jokes, if the tape scarcity continues, even some of
>the archived recordings might become expendable. "I'm just fearful that
>all the master tapes at the loft would be worth more if they were
>blank," he says.
>======================================================
Horrible -- I can't imagine _anybody_ to wipe out valuable recordings,
not only masters, to regain a blank tape. I think the story is blown
up a little. And who would recored masters on that heavily spliced
tape. Manufacturers and sellers sometimes swore that the tape wasn't
spliced.
Edi Zubovic, Crikvenica, Croatia
Jay Kadis
wrote:
In fact, one could argue that real purists welcome modern digital systems that
do not "do something" to the signal. Or at least do less.
I'm doing my first project entirely in Logic and I'm a little surprised by how
much I like the sound.
I do still have a case of 1/2" 456, but it's looking less and less like it'll
get used any time soon.
-Jay
--
x------- Jay Kadis ------- x---- Jay's Attic Studio ------x
x Lecturer, Audio Engineer x Dexter Records x
x CCRMA, Stanford University x http://www.offbeats.com/ x
x---------- http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jay/ ------------x
Martin Hart
Michel,
I think the inference here is that the "something" was desireable to
tape users. I've been a high fidelity audio freak for more decades than
I care to admit but once you start using the various noise reduction
systems, which work wonders, you can pretty well kiss anything relating
to the medium goodbye, so I can't hear any significant difference
between decent digital, decent analog, solid state versus tubes, etc. I
guess aging has its benefits.
Marty
--
http://www.widescreenmuseum.com
The American WideScreen Museum
JP Gerard
I managed to buy a box of tape - only 5 reels! - and I could have done
without such an expense at the moment.
If I have to go digital soon, it means investing more money in the studio's
recording platform, and I wasn't planning on doing that anytime soon.
Arrrgh...
JP
Scott Dorsey
Well, that's the nice thing about analogue tape. You can do a whole
variety of different things. You can make it pretty transparent or
you get a huge number of different sounds out of it, ranging from subtle
smoothing effects to extreme harshness. It's a production tool, just like
any other.
You can adjust operating level, bias point, tape speed, emphasis and tape
formulation to get a huge number of different things to happen to the sound,
and that is all under your control. Well, except for tape formulation, which
is becoming increasingly limited and beyond our control, I am sad to report.
It's not the right tool for everything; the low end response problems are
always a pain in the neck so doing something like a pipe organ recording and
having it sound accurate is much more difficult than it is with good digital
gear. Those same problems can turn into advantages with rock recordings
where you can use the head bump to help you.
U-CDK_CHARLES\Charles
> Michel Hafner <mha...@mhafner.ch> wrote:
>>MrPepper11 wrote:
>>
>>>The purists have a romantic attachment to the taping process. "It's a
>>>much more musical medium than digital could ever dream of being," says
>>>Joe Gastwirt, a mastering engineer who has worked with the Grateful
>>>Dead and others. "It actually does something to the music.
>>>
>>The last sentence says it all. I'd rather do 'something' to the music
>>under my
>>control, not the medium's, should I feel the need to do 'something'.
>
> Well, that's the nice thing about analogue tape. You can do a whole
> variety of different things. You can make it pretty transparent or
> you get a huge number of different sounds out of it, ranging from subtle
> smoothing effects to extreme harshness. It's a production tool, just like
> any other.
>
So has anyone ever made a "Tape Saturation Amplifier" that approximates
the charactistics of tape?
Arny Krueger
news:41e5497a$1...@news.cybercity.ch
To this day analog tape and effective simulations of it provides some of the
most euphonic compression known.
Scott Dorsey
Characteristics of which tape under which conditions?
Lots of people have sold cheap boxes that are supposed to simulate tape
saturation. But most of the interesting things that tape does have nothing
to do with the overload characteristics anyway. I spent most of my life
trying to _avoid_ tape saturation.
This isn't an easy thing to model at all, and it's more like modelling a
musical instrument than anything else.
Martin Hart
says...
What does "euphonic compression" mean?
JP Gerard
JP
"U-CDK_CHARLES\Charles" <"Charles Krug"@aol.com> a écrit dans le message de
news:ZMdFd.7812$gb.6970@trndny03...
Geoff Wood
"Martin Hart" <see-a...@website.listed.below.org> wrote in message some
>> most euphonic compression known.
>>
>
> What does "euphonic compression" mean?
Compresion with artifacts (maybe as yet unquantified) that for some reason
sound nice. Nothing to do with euphoniums, necessarily.
geoff
playon
In Jamaica, where times are always tough, it was a standard practice
among starving artists to "rent" or borrow 1 & 2 inch tape. After you
finished mixing your tunes, you erased it and sold it to the next guy,
or gave it back to the guy you rented/loaned it to you.
Al
playon
wrote:
The digital recording platform could cost less than a case of tape...
and then there's the $ you will save by not having to buy tape
anymore.
Al
JP Gerard
1) I don't want cheap digital audio, I know what it sounds like, and I'd
rather go back to working on music video sets than running a studio based on
cheap ass digital audio.
2) I want a removable format for easy archiving, which means at least a pair
of Tascam DAs (no ADATs, thanks you), which cost a lot more than a case of
tape.
JP
"playon" <play...@comcast.net> a écrit dans le message de
news:aa0bu0tvtk6jh18ck...@4ax.com...
S O'Neill
> 2 major problems:
>
> 1) I don't want cheap digital audio, I know what it sounds like, and I'd
> rather go back to working on music video sets than running a studio based on
> cheap ass digital audio.
> 2) I want a removable format for easy archiving, which means at least a pair
> of Tascam DAs (no ADATs, thanks you), which cost a lot more than a case of
> tape.
Good choice, though, but they don't make the DA-78HR anymore :(
DA-98's are amazingly expensive.
Scott Norwood
In article <aa0bu0tvtk6jh18ck...@4ax.com>,
playon <play...@comcast.net> wrote:
>
>The digital recording platform could cost less than a case of tape...
>and then there's the $ you will save by not having to buy tape
>anymore.
Yes, but will the "cheap" digital replacement work for decades or
will it require yearly upgrades (read: $$$)? Does it provide a
near- universal format for interchange of recordings among users?
Will it be as portable and durable as a tape recorder (e.g. Nagra)
can be?
Out of curiousity, what is the usual recording format for radio
news programs? I know that WBZ in Boston (a 50kw AM news station)
is still using cassettes, but stations like NPR are obviously using
something (DAT?) with much higher quality. How is the typical
radio news show edited now? Tape or digital?
--
Scott Norwood: snor...@nyx.net, snor...@redballoon.net
Cool Home Page: http://www.redballoon.net/
Lame Quote: Penguins? In Snack Canyon?
play on
disks? You can buy the converters of your choice if you go the
computer route.
Al
On Wed, 12 Jan 2005 21:17:32 +0100, "JP Gerard" <jpge...@skynet.be>
JP Gerard
I think they all lack a bit of depth, but ADAs can be upgraded later.
Yes, the 98s are extremely pricey.
But you can find used 88s and 38s for not too much money.
JP
"S O'Neill" <nop...@nospam.net> a écrit dans le message de
news:d4Cdnekv6fK...@omsoft.com...
play on
wrote:
>But you can find used 88s and 38s for not too much money.
I have a used DA-38 + remote with very low hours on it if you are
interested.
Al
JP Gerard
See, it could be so simple... but it never is.
I just can't afford a decent digital system right now.
But... a computer is right out, I'm allergic to the things.
Typing this is about as much as I can stand :O)
JP
"play on" <play...@comcast.net> a écrit dans le message de
news:rs3bu0djuvpnc38bb...@4ax.com...
Predrag Trpkov
"playon" <play...@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:q20bu0hpbrlnr0vbs...@4ax.com...
> In Jamaica, where times are always tough, it was a standard practice
> among starving artists to "rent" or borrow 1 & 2 inch tape. After you
> finished mixing your tunes, you erased it and sold it to the next guy,
> or gave it back to the guy you rented/loaned it to you.
I owned a 24-track 2" for seven years, sold it last summer. I never came
close to a situation where I could suggest a client to buy their own tape.
It would have been considered a tasteless joke. Granted, I never had a lot
of work anyway, but seven years is a long time and it was all done on four
rolls of 499 that I bought new in 1997.
Although hardly anybody's really starving here in Croatia, there's been
nothing but tough times for the past 25 years. Two years ago I bought around
50 old 2" tapes, leftover from a long-defunct, but probably the busiest
croatian studio in the second half of the eighties. Well known pop/rock
artists' names and titles on the dusty boxes, but none of it on the tapes.
Only some unlabeled jazz or demos. Judging by the look, they must have been
reused a hundred times afterwards. Paying for the 2" tapes was obviously so
uncommon that even record companies regularly skimped on that kind of
expenses, irrespective of the album budget and expected sales.
The guy that bought my machine hasn't even considered buying a new tape yet.
Predrag
Jay Levitt
<"Charles Krug"@aol.com> says...
>
> So has anyone ever made a "Tape Saturation Amplifier" that approximates
> the charactistics of tape?
Voxengo recently introduced a VST plugin that's supposed to simulate
more of the facets of tape - not just tape saturation, but also the
phase smearing - via both modeling and an impulse response. I tried it,
and it did nice things to a track, but I have very little experience
with tape, and can't say if it comes anywhere near what tape can do in
the right hands.
Jay Levitt |
Wellesley, MA | Hi!
Faster: jay at jay dot eff-em | Where are we going?
http://www.jay.fm | Why am I in this handbasket?
Arny Krueger
news:41e5...@clear.net.nz
Agreed. Done right, analog tape can even remove or substantially reduce the
nasty sounds due to clipping in mics and preamps.
Scott Dorsey
>1) I don't want cheap digital audio, I know what it sounds like, and I'd
>rather go back to working on music video sets than running a studio based on
>cheap ass digital audio.
>2) I want a removable format for easy archiving, which means at least a pair
>of Tascam DAs (no ADATs, thanks you), which cost a lot more than a case of
>tape.
Actually, the DA-38 machines are selling for next to nothing on the used
market in the US. And you can get the RME converters as front ends for
them, and the combination sounds pretty respectable. One of my portable
kits is built this way and it's a lot easier to carry around than the Ampex.
You cannot run timecode without having at least one DA-88 machine in the
link, although the DA-38 appears to be a more reliable transport design.
Scott Dorsey
>
>Out of curiousity, what is the usual recording format for radio
>news programs? I know that WBZ in Boston (a 50kw AM news station)
>is still using cassettes, but stations like NPR are obviously using
>something (DAT?) with much higher quality. How is the typical
>radio news show edited now? Tape or digital?
NPR was the last of the networks to go to digital. They pretty much
record everything that comes into the studios on a network of hard disk
recorders, edit on the hard disk recorders, and air over the bird from
the disk.
They were actually cutting 1/4" tape and running tape to air until a couple
years ago.
Now, the stuff that comes into the network comes in a lot of different
formats, from call-ins and live studio interviews recorded direct to
hard disk, to interviews recorded on cassettes in the field, to classical
music programs that come in to NPR in DC on DAT tapes or over ISDN lines.
Georges Collinais even plays a 78 now and then.
Scott Dorsey
>Why not use a hard disk recorder, or a computer, with removable hard
>disks? You can buy the converters of your choice if you go the
>computer route.
No long-term archives. Sure, you can dump the files to DLT and put them on
the shelf, but that takes time and costs even more.
Logan Shaw
> play on <play...@comcast.net> wrote:
>
>>Why not use a hard disk recorder, or a computer, with removable hard
>>disks? You can buy the converters of your choice if you go the
>>computer route.
> No long-term archives. Sure, you can dump the files to DLT and put them on
> the shelf, but that takes time and costs even more.
You can do long-term archiving of digital data. What you can't
really do (for sure, yet) is zero-maintenance long-term archiving[1].
You pretty much need to keep a couple of copies around, and every
5 years or so "refresh" them by copying them to new media. It's
not a bad idea to also compare any supposedly-identical files to
be sure they're still correct. It's perpetual work, but the good
news is that it should get easier if storage capacity continues
to improve, because you can consolidate things as you go. (For
example, 10 years ago, I had boxes and boxes full of hundreds of
floppy disks of random stuff. These days I could fit I could fit
it all on one CD-ROM if I wanted.)
- Logan
[1] Of course, you never could with analog media, either.
You can't just store tapes in a shed behind your house;
they have to be in a climate-controlled environment, etc.
play on
>play on <play...@comcast.net> wrote:
>>Why not use a hard disk recorder, or a computer, with removable hard
>>disks? You can buy the converters of your choice if you go the
>>computer route.
>
>No long-term archives. Sure, you can dump the files to DLT and put them on
>the shelf, but that takes time and costs even more.
Yeah that is the achilles heel of digital I guess. Although what if
someday they have affordable large capacity flash drives? Wouldn't
that be a good way to archive? No moving parts, etc.
Al
hab...@webtv.net
hab...@webtv.net
BEST BIRDS
Edward Bridge
news:41e5644e$0$330$ba62...@news.skynet.be...
> This situation really sucks.
Have no fear, it's like when Coke years ago, as you remember, decided to
change thier secret ingredients, well everyone flip a lid when the new coke
came out , so soon , out comes the "classic coke."
Maybe shortages of tape could bring a new appreciations from many who
have over look their old gear, or people who may now be willing to pay a
little more for tape or by people who_now_ want to record on "vintage" gear
which could be a plus for your business or I'm totally wrong ,which happens
a lot with my business. . lol .
Peace,
Ed Bridge
Brooklyn N.Y.
http://www.bridgeclassicalguitars.com/
Kurt Albershardt
>
> Georges Collinais even plays a 78 now and then.
And what wonderful music he does play!
Saul Pincus
Saul Pincus.
On 1/12/2005 9:03 PM, in article
vFkFd.5129$KJ2....@newsread3.news.atl.earthlink.net, "Edward Bridge"
Scott Dorsey
>Donšt laugh. Vinyl has already made something of a minor comeback. ;)
Sure, but I have THREE companies making lacquers (two in the US, one in
Japan). Versus one company making tape.
Harry Chickpea
>Saul Pincus <sa...@sympatico.ca> wrote:
>>Donšt laugh. Vinyl has already made something of a minor comeback. ;)
>
>Sure, but I have THREE companies making lacquers (two in the US, one in
>Japan). Versus one company making tape.
>--scott
Aw shucks. Moonshine it. Rusted iron filings, cellophane tape, hobby
knife. :-)
Better yet, wire recorders.
Why is this beginning to sound like a sequence from 1632?
Mike Rivers
In article <MPG.1c4f1f70a...@news-server.houston.rr.com> see-a...@website.listed.below.org writes:
> I think the inference here is that the "something" was desireable to
> tape users. I've been a high fidelity audio freak for more decades than
> I care to admit but once you start using the various noise reduction
> systems, which work wonders, you can pretty well kiss anything relating
> to the medium goodbye, so I can't hear any significant difference
> between decent digital, decent analog, solid state versus tubes, etc. I
> guess aging has its benefits.
The problem is that there are still a number of studios that prefer
tracking on tape for a number of reasons. They have the equipment,
they have the money, all they need is the tape. They didn't expect
that to be yanked away from them suddenly.
People scream bloody murder when a hardware or software product is
discontinued. Eventually they make an adjustment, but it doesn't
happen overnight.
--
I'm really Mike Rivers (mri...@d-and-d.com)
However, until the spam goes away or Hell freezes over,
lots of IP addresses are blocked from this system. If
you e-mail me and it bounces, use your secret decoder ring
and reach me here: double-m-eleven-double-zero at yahoo
Mike Rivers
> Why not use a hard disk recorder, or a computer, with removable hard
> disks?
You can't put a disk drive in a vault and expect to play it easily in
50 years. There are a lot more people today who have 1/4" tape decks
as working tools than there are people who have computers with, say,
MFM disk drives. Where do you expect to get a box with an IDE or SCSI
interface fifty years from now except from a computer collector?
Using a disk drive as long term storage won't work. It puts an
additional respoinsibility on the owner to clone it to a new medium
perhaps as often as every five years. Can you imagine the labor for a
major record label, even though it's "automatic?"
Mike Rivers
> You cannot run timecode without having at least one DA-88 machine in the
> link, although the DA-38 appears to be a more reliable transport design.
You can always do it the old fashioned way and record it on one track
of the tape. It might be annoying that the time code that you record
doesn't agree with the time displayed on the front of the recorder,
but you can always put a piece of gaffer tape over the time display if
it bothers you.
And anything that you can do on eight tracks, you can do on seven. <g>
Mike Rivers
> The digital recording platform could cost less than a case of tape...
> and then there's the $ you will save by not having to buy tape
> anymore.
Sure, and taking the bus costs less than owning a car, but it's not
the same. A digital and an analog recording platform can both record
audio but that's about the only thing they have in common. There are
good things to like about both, and when you have to make a decision,
it's nice to be able to go either way depending on circumstances.
Geoff Wood
>2 major problems:
>
> 1) I don't want cheap digital audio, I know what it sounds like,
Have you listened to some lately ?
geoff
Geoff Wood
"JP Gerard" <jpge...@skynet.be> wrote in message
news:41e585f9$0$2644$ba62...@news.skynet.be...
>2 major problems:
> 2) I want a removable format for easy archiving, which means at least a
> pair
> of Tascam DAs (no ADATs, thanks you), which cost a lot more than a case of
> tape.
Most 'cheap digital audio' from the last 3 or more years is infintiely
better (well, heaps better) than any Tascam DA-xx .
geoff
geoley
"S O'Neill" <nop...@nospam.net> wrote in message
> JP Gerard wrote:
>
>>
>> 1) I don't want cheap digital audio, I know what it sounds like, and I'd
>> rather go back to working on music video sets than running a studio based
>> on
>> cheap ass digital audio.
>> pair
>> of Tascam DAs (no ADATs, thanks you), which cost a lot more than a case
>> of
>> tape.
>
>
>
> DA-98's are amazingly expensive.
How about the Sony PCM-R500
GA
Bobby P Longsocks
hab...@webtv.net says...
> PENGUINS ARE THE BEST BIRDSPENGUINS ARE THE BEST BIRDSPENGUINS ARE THE
> BEST BIRDS
>
>
Blue pills... 2nd shelf
medicine cabinet.
and for the record..
Emu's are the best birds.
Bobby P Longsocks
JP Gerard
The 38's transport reliability comment is interesting.
The main thing scaring me out about MDMs remains, I have to say, the tiny
transports that are not really user or even tech-serviceable.
I have had horrible experciences with ADATs and DATs, but don't have any
real experience with Tascam DAs. I would expect better transports.
So if the 38's transport is better, it's a big thing for me, since as you
point out, converters can be changed.
Interesting option.
JP
"Scott Dorsey" <klu...@panix.com> a écrit dans le message de
news:cs4fh5$lps$1...@panix2.panix.com...
JP Gerard
In a multitrack environment, it just doesn't do it for me.
JP
"Geoff Wood" <ge...@nospam-paf.co.nz> a écrit dans le message de
news:41e5...@clear.net.nz...
JP Gerard
removable media.
JP
"Geoff Wood" <ge...@nospam-paf.co.nz> a écrit dans le message de
news:41e5...@clear.net.nz...
>
Geoff Wood
"Mike Rivers" <mri...@d-and-d.com> wrote in message
news:znr1105577497k@trad...
>
> In article <rs3bu0djuvpnc38bb...@4ax.com>
> play...@comcast.net writes:
>
>> Why not use a hard disk recorder, or a computer, with removable hard
>> disks?
>
> You can't put a disk drive in a vault and expect to play it easily in
> 50 years. There are a lot more people today who have 1/4" tape decks
> as working tools than there are people who have computers with, say,
> MFM disk drives. Where do you expect to get a box with an IDE or SCSI
> interface fifty years from now except from a computer collector?
So, collect a few PC's, HDDs , etc, and put them in a storeroom. You could
be a millionaire in 50 years. Not to mention an old one !
> Using a disk drive as long term storage won't work. It puts an
> additional respoinsibility on the owner to clone it to a new medium
> perhaps as often as every five years. Can you imagine the labor for a
> major record label, even though it's "automatic?"
Well you can clone "bit-for-bit" a hard disk to as many other digital media
that does exist, and those that will exist.
geoff
Geoff Wood
> tracking on tape for a number of reasons. They have the equipment,
> they have the money, all they need is the tape. They didn't expect
> that to be yanked away from them suddenly.
But there are zillions of reels of used tape stashed away. Given that the
euphonic effects are already imposed on those hotly-recorded tapes, they can
now be digitised (with the very best gear of course, offerring approx double
the resolution) , and re-used.
geoff
Geoff Wood
> Hey Scott...
>
> The 38's transport reliability comment is interesting.
>
> The main thing scaring me out about MDMs remains, I have to say, the tiny
> transports that are not really user or even tech-serviceable.
> I have had horrible experciences with ADATs and DATs, but don't have any
> real experience with Tascam DAs. I would expect better transports.
I have. '88 transports are not great. I (don't) have a grand that says so.
>
> So if the 38's transport is better, it's a big thing for me, since as you
> point out, converters can be changed.
Dunno about '38s, but I know I'm never going to find out !
geoff
Mike Rivers
> Have no fear, it's like when Coke years ago, as you remember, decided to
> change thier secret ingredients, well everyone flip a lid when the new coke
> came out , so soon , out comes the "classic coke."
Bad example. The Coca Cola company didn't go out of business, fire all
their employees, and sell off their manufacturing equipment.
If there was an uproar because Quantegy stopped making 456 but still
made GP9, perhaps they might start making it again (maybe naming it
"Classic 456").
Mike Rivers
> You can do long-term archiving of digital data. What you can't
> really do (for sure, yet) is zero-maintenance long-term archiving[1].
This is true, and this is the problem. It's expensive enough to
provide storage space. Few people or even corporations have the budget
for archive maintenance.
> You pretty much need to keep a couple of copies around, and every
> 5 years or so "refresh" them by copying them to new media. It's
> not a bad idea to also compare any supposedly-identical files to
> be sure they're still correct. It's perpetual work, but the good
> news is that it should get easier if storage capacity continues
> to improve, because you can consolidate things as you go. (For
> example, 10 years ago, I had boxes and boxes full of hundreds of
> floppy disks of random stuff. These days I could fit I could fit
> it all on one CD-ROM if I wanted.)
I used to have a program that indexed my floppy disks so I could
quickly look up what disk a file was on. This was back in the days
when several files, even executable programs, would fit on a floppy
disk. I have CDs all over the place now, some labeled, and I still
have to search for them. One of the problems with consolidating a lot
of material on a physically small medium is that there needs to be a
companion indexing system (which also needs backup).
A 2" tape box is large enough so that you can write on at least two
surfaces large enough to read, even in a semi-lit closet.
martin griffith
wrote:
>PENGUINS ARE THE BEST BIRDS
and they are very sporting
http://n.ethz.ch/student/mkos/pinguin.swf
martin
Serious error.
All shortcuts have disappeared.
Screen. Mind. Both are blank.
Edward Bridge
realignmentnews:znr1105614064k@trad...
> Bad example.
maybe a miss example,let it go.
> The Coca Cola company didn't go out of business, fire all
> their employees, and sell off their manufacturing equipment.
Has Quantegy hired or are the employees laid off? I bet your corrrect,
this is your line of work.
My supplier and friends shop supplier said the same thing in different words
"realignment" but they may have been just being "PC"
--
Mike Rivers
> But there are zillions of reels of used tape stashed away. Given that the
> euphonic effects are already imposed on those hotly-recorded tapes, they can
> now be digitised (with the very best gear of course, offerring approx double
> the resolution) , and re-used.
First, you'll never improve on resolution that isn't there to begin
with, so "double the resolution" is meaningless.
It would be a real blow to find that tape is worth more blank than
with something recorded on it.
Another thing is that the people who have the budget for analog tape
projects today prefer to start with new tape. Lightly used tape is
fine for most projects, but most people who regularly use it have had
a problem at some time. Not to say that they have never had a problem
with new tape, but it makes one suspicious. And that dropout ALWAYS
occurs in the best take, or you missed it when tracking and now the
musician is on tour and can't re-do the part.
Mike Rivers
> Well you can clone "bit-for-bit" a hard disk to as many other digital media
> that does exist, and those that will exist.
My point, that you obvioulsy missed, is that you HAVE to do that in
order to have any expectation of being able to recover the archived
material. You can put a reel of analog tape on a shelf for 50 years,
and as long as it stays in a place where you don't mind living, you'll
be able to play it. It may not be bit-perfect but it will be playable.
On the other hand, if new analog tape really disappears, old analog
tape decks will probalby start hitting the landfills at a faster rate
than they have been.
Scott Dorsey
The 38 is the most reliable of the bunch. The 20-bit units definitely are
much more touchy about setup and alignment than the 16-bit units. Since I
am having Teamsters carry this stuff in and out of concert halls all the time,
I have been much happier with the DA-38 reliability under those circumstances
than any of the others.
Eddie Ciletti (www.tangible-technology.com) has some modifications for the
DA-88 units that make them more reliable, though I can't see investing a
lot of money into one of those things.
>The main thing scaring me out about MDMs remains, I have to say, the tiny
>transports that are not really user or even tech-serviceable.
>I have had horrible experciences with ADATs and DATs, but don't have any
>real experience with Tascam DAs. I would expect better transports.
The Tascam is a huge step up from the ADAT, but it's no better than a lot of
DAT transports. And you really should have a specialist tech work on the
thing. Mostly because the alignment tape costs several times more than the
recorder does, which makes setting up to do alignment on the bench a problem.
>So if the 38's transport is better, it's a big thing for me, since as you
>point out, converters can be changed.
For the most part, I have been happy with them. But they are, as has been
noted, already obsolete technology.
Scott Dorsey
>In article <vFkFd.5129$KJ2....@newsread3.news.atl.earthlink.net> edbridg...@earthlink.net writes:
>
>> Have no fear, it's like when Coke years ago, as you remember, decided to
>> change thier secret ingredients, well everyone flip a lid when the new coke
>> came out , so soon , out comes the "classic coke."
>
>Bad example. The Coca Cola company didn't go out of business, fire all
>their employees, and sell off their manufacturing equipment.
But if they HAD, they probably would have got a lot less bad press than
they did.
>If there was an uproar because Quantegy stopped making 456 but still
>made GP9, perhaps they might start making it again (maybe naming it
>"Classic 456").
We should all demand real cane sugar back.
Jay Kadis
wrote:
> JP Gerard <jpge...@skynet.be> wrote:
> >1) I don't want cheap digital audio, I know what it sounds like, and I'd
> >rather go back to working on music video sets than running a studio based on
> >cheap ass digital audio.
> >2) I want a removable format for easy archiving, which means at least a pair
> >of Tascam DAs (no ADATs, thanks you), which cost a lot more than a case of
> >tape.
>
> Actually, the DA-38 machines are selling for next to nothing on the used
> market in the US. And you can get the RME converters as front ends for
> them, and the combination sounds pretty respectable. One of my portable
> kits is built this way and it's a lot easier to carry around than the Ampex.
>
> You cannot run timecode without having at least one DA-88 machine in the
> link, although the DA-38 appears to be a more reliable transport design.
> --scott
Well, you can't chase TC with a DA-38, but it can generate MTC and SMPTE from
the ABS code with the MMC-38. We've had pretty good luck with the DA-38
transports, at least better than the SV-3700 transports.
-Jay
--
x------- Jay Kadis ------- x---- Jay's Attic Studio ------x
x Lecturer, Audio Engineer x Dexter Records x
x CCRMA, Stanford University x http://www.offbeats.com/ x
x---------- http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jay/ ------------x
S O'Neill
>
> The 38 is the most reliable of the bunch. The 20-bit units definitely are
> much more touchy about setup and alignment than the 16-bit units.
I wasn't aware of 20-bit Tascams. Mine are 24-bit.
Edward Bridge
news:2wvFd.5915$C52...@newsread2.news.atl.earthlink.net...
>
> Has Quantegy hired
Sorry, I meant "Has Quantegy fired ".. umm. maybe to much coke with
the_cane_ in my dazes or days.. :>)
Geoff Wood
> projects today prefer to start with new tape.
I think the point is that 'prefer' may not be an option....
geoff
Geoff Wood
>
> In article <41e6...@clear.net.nz> ge...@nospam-paf.co.nz writes:
>
>> Well you can clone "bit-for-bit" a hard disk to as many other digital
>> media
>> that does exist, and those that will exist.
>
> My point, that you obvioulsy missed, is that you HAVE to do that in
> order to have any expectation of being able to recover the archived
> material.
Banks don't have a problem with that. And they are pretty mean.
>You can put a reel of analog tape on a shelf for 50 years,
> and as long as it stays in a place where you don't mind living, you'll
> be able to play it. It may not be bit-perfect but it will be playable.
CD-Rs, well we just don't know. Mitsui were suggesting 300 years in proper
conditions.
geoff
audioguy
"Bobby P Longsocks" <REMOVE_...@s94192167.onlinehome.us> wrote in
message news:MPG.1c4ff7dba4db0acd989722@NNTP...
Allen Corneau
"U-CDK_CHARLES\Charles" <"Charles Krug"@aol.com> wrote:
>
> So has anyone ever made a "Tape Saturation Amplifier" that approximates
> the charactistics of tape?
>
Most of the standard plug-in's are not that great, but on a per-track basis
they can be somewhat useful.
The best one out there is the Crane Song HEDD-192. A lot of us mastering
engineer-types use them on a daily basis, replacing the previous technique
of moving all-digital mixes to tape before loading them back in.
Allen
--
Allen Corneau
Mastering Engineer
Essential Sound Mastering
Houston, TX
hank alrich
> For my money it's the Apteryx. A wingless bird with hairy feathers.
Okay, but they're vintage and very expensive. Penguins are much cheaper
and fly nearly as well.
--
ha
play on
wrote:
>
>In article <RHjFd.1075$_56....@fe2.texas.rr.com> lshaw-...@austin.rr.com writes:
>
>> You can do long-term archiving of digital data. What you can't
>> really do (for sure, yet) is zero-maintenance long-term archiving[1].
>
>This is true, and this is the problem. It's expensive enough to
>provide storage space. Few people or even corporations have the budget
>for archive maintenance.
But these concerns are even worse with analog media, in terms of
space. And analog safety copies must be done in real time. I don't
think digital archiving is more onerous than trying to keep old tapes
from degrading.
Al
Frank Vuotto
<urbin...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>For my money it's the Apteryx. A wingless bird with hairy feathers.
>
But turkeys are so delicious.
Frank /~ http://newmex.com/f10
@/
Mike Rivers
> CD-Rs, well we just don't know. Mitsui were suggesting 300 years in proper
> conditions.
But a CD-R is pretty useless without a CD player. My money is on there
not being any CD players 300 years (and small money on 100 years) from
now, and there won't be because the archivists haven't preserved the
documentation well enough to know how to build one.
Anyone with tools and a knowledge of basic electronics can build an
analog tape deck, but I can't conceive of reverse-engineering
something to put the pits into meaningful form from a CD.
Scott Dorsey
>
>Anyone with tools and a knowledge of basic electronics can build an
>analog tape deck, but I can't conceive of reverse-engineering
>something to put the pits into meaningful form from a CD.
CD isn't so bad. It's just data bits and CRC bits and not much else in the
bitstream. I think I could probably do it. MD would be a _lot_ harder.
--scott
(reverse-engineering CDC tape formats from just the media this month)
play on
wrote:
>In article <41e6...@clear.net.nz> ge...@nospam-paf.co.nz writes:
>
>> CD-Rs, well we just don't know. Mitsui were suggesting 300 years in proper
>> conditions.
>
>But a CD-R is pretty useless without a CD player. My money is on there
>not being any CD players 300 years (and small money on 100 years) from
>now, and there won't be because the archivists haven't preserved the
>documentation well enough to know how to build one.
This seems to be a silly argument. Do you think there will be Studer
24 track machines in working condition 300 years from now?
What do you think the odds are that in 300 years there will still be
digitally-based music files, and machines to read them, as opposed to
the possibility of having working machines that can play back magnetic
tape?
Al
james of tucson
> They have the equipment,
> they have the money, all they need is the tape. They didn't expect
> that to be yanked away from them suddenly.
Suddenly? The demise of vinyl might have been sudden, but the writing's
been on the wall about the coming of digital for a couple of decades.
Now, we've dropped the ball, as we are *just now* getting to the point
where we can take for granted things like accurate clocks and
standardized lossless transfer interfaces, but the writing's been on the
wall, and that stuff is coming late.
People sandbagged instead of moving with the trend of technolog, and
that includes studio owners as well as engineers and the people who
finance them.
The whole revelation that analog tape involved killing whales did it for
me. I say yank it away with prejudice.
> People scream bloody murder when a hardware or software product is
> discontinued. Eventually they make an adjustment, but it doesn't
> happen overnight.
Well, when a whole *industry* is discontinued, they usually do more than
just scream bloody murder. They do stuff like litigate, and corner
markets.
It happened with bat guano, it's happening with tape, and someday, it
will happen with crude oil.
You know, the day crude oil becomes unavailable, I imagine people will
be complaining how their whole supply was "yanked away from them
suddenly." They will have had centuries to prepare, and while there
might be sympathy for those who procrastinate, there will also be
success for those who did not.
Adapt, buggy whip manufacturers, for the age of the automobile is at hand.
james of tucson
> Another thing is that the people who have the budget for analog tape
> projects today prefer to start with new tape. Lightly used tape is
> fine for most projects, but most people who regularly use it have had
> a problem at some time.
I used to get 1" tape for dirt cheap (price of the reels, in the
mid-80's), from a place that recorded stuff like radio jingles.
The point is, even they wouldn't re-use the tape. I never had a
problem that I know of, but then, all I used it for was recording
the college choir.
Geoff Wood
>
> In article <41e6...@clear.net.nz> ge...@nospam-paf.co.nz writes:
>
>> CD-Rs, well we just don't know. Mitsui were suggesting 300 years in
>> proper
>> conditions.
>
> But a CD-R is pretty useless without a CD player. My money is on there
> not being any CD players 300 years (and small money on 100 years)
We'll al be 'virtual' by then anyway...
geoff
" We knew all along there were never any WMDs. We just lied..." G W
Bush
Ben Bradley
>...
>Georges Collinais even plays a 78 now and then.
Who is that? I googled the web, and the ONLY reference I found is
where you mention his name in a post last summer, archived on one of
these Usenet-ripoff websites:
http://www.audio-forum.net/pro/The_end_of_NPR__PBS_is_near_914336.html
>--scott
james of tucson
> So has anyone ever made a "Tape Saturation Amplifier" that approximates
> the charactistics of tape?
Ah, this is the rub -- you can apply expensive and complex signal
processing to try to simulate the desirable aberrations of tape,
but you will always have just that, a simulation, and it's a state that
you get with tape by default. (Actually, I know there is a great deal
of skill involved in finesseing tape).
Another problem is more fundamental (no pun intended yet), as the
continuity inherent in an analog singal path is not really available in
digital. So you end up with odd-ordered harmonics (it may be high in
the frequency range, but sooner or later you have a shelf, and a square
wave is up there, and it's too often too close to 40kHz.)
Acoustic/analog devices tend to aberrate toward adding even-ordered
harmonics, and digital devices tend to aberrate toward odd harmonics.
People like to simplify things by explaining that digital is a "perfect"
reproduction, and the reasoning is that the frequency and dynamic
domains are well beyond the proportions of human perception. But that's
an oversimplification. There is plenty of dynamic headroom, sure, and a
24kHz Nyquist frequency is enough for any musical application (despite
the fact that people still argue this, not all of them researchers
involved with bats and submarines), but that's still not the whole
story.
So you can simulate tape, with something complicated and expensive and
imperfect, or you can use tape, and keep it simple, except for the
complexity and expense of obtaining the tape resource.
james of tucson
On 2005-01-12, Geoff Wood <ge...@nospam-paf.co.nz> wrote:
> Compresion with artifacts (maybe as yet unquantified) that for some reason
> sound nice. Nothing to do with euphoniums, necessarily.
The "some reason" is at least partly, continuity in the harmonics, and
the characteristics of digital devices that lead to a high proportion of
odd-ordered harmonics.
Arny Krueger
message news:slrncuefa4....@radagast.home.conservatory.com
> On 2005-01-12, U-CDK_CHARLES\Charles <"Charles Krug"@aol.com> wrote:
>> So has anyone ever made a "Tape Saturation Amplifier" that
>> approximates the charactistics of tape?
> Ah, this is the rub -- you can apply expensive and complex signal
> processing to try to simulate the desirable aberrations of tape,
> but you will always have just that, a simulation, and it's a state
> that you get with tape by default. (Actually, I know there is a
> great deal of skill involved in finesseing tape).
The beauty of tape simulations is what you don't get.
> Another problem is more fundamental (no pun intended yet), as the
> continuity inherent in an analog singal path is not really available
> in digital.
Oh boy, here we go again! This is simply not true.
> So you end up with odd-ordered harmonics (it may be high
> in the frequency range, but sooner or later you have a shelf, and a
> square wave is up there, and it's too often too close to 40kHz.)
It's sad when people set them up as critics of technology that they
obviously don't understand.
> Acoustic/analog devices tend to aberrate toward adding even-ordered
> harmonics, and digital devices tend to aberrate toward odd harmonics.
If only...
> People like to simplify things by explaining that digital is a
> "perfect" reproduction, and the reasoning is that the frequency and
> dynamic domains are well beyond the proportions of human perception.
Well, by the time you get to 24/192 the digital format is very much
overkill. But blind tests show that even 14/32 is on the edge of overkill.
> But that's an oversimplification. There is plenty of dynamic
> headroom, sure, and a 24kHz Nyquist frequency is enough for any
> musical application (despite the fact that people still argue this,
> not all of them researchers involved with bats and submarines), but
> that's still not the whole story.
Actually it is, and this paragraph contradicts your earlier claims, James.
> So you can simulate tape, with something complicated and expensive and
> imperfect,
Like a piece of software with an incremental cost of next to zero.
>or you can use tape, and keep it simple, except for the
> complexity and expense of obtaining the tape resource.
If tape were only that simple to live with there would be no such thing as
digital audio.
Mike Rivers
> >But a CD-R is pretty useless without a CD player. My money is on there
> >not being any CD players 300 years (and small money on 100 years) from
> >now, and there won't be because the archivists haven't preserved the
> >documentation well enough to know how to build one.
>
> This seems to be a silly argument. Do you think there will be Studer
> 24 track machines in working condition 300 years from now?
Of course not, but there will be lathes and amplifiers and soldering
irons. How easy is it to build a CD player and figure out how to put
the bits in some useful form to produce audio?
> What do you think the odds are that in 300 years there will still be
> digitally-based music files, and machines to read them, as opposed to
> the possibility of having working machines that can play back magnetic
> tape?
I'm not sure what your question is, but I think I already answered it.
Odds are close to zero that there will be any of either machine
around, but if you have to build something from scratch, odds are
you'll successfully build an analog player sooner than a digital one.
dt king
news:jay-753662.0...@news.stanford.edu...
> In article <41e5497a$1...@news.cybercity.ch>, Michel Hafner
<mha...@mhafner.ch>
> wrote:
>
> > MrPepper11 wrote:
> >
> > >The purists have a romantic attachment to the taping process. "It's a
> > >much more musical medium than digital could ever dream of being," says
> > >Joe Gastwirt, a mastering engineer who has worked with the Grateful
> > >Dead and others. "It actually does something to the music.
> > >
> > >
> > The last sentence says it all. I'd rather do 'something' to the music
> > under my
> > control, not the medium's, should I feel the need to do 'something'.
>
> In fact, one could argue that real purists welcome modern digital systems
that
> do not "do something" to the signal. Or at least do less.
>
> I'm doing my first project entirely in Logic and I'm a little surprised by
how
> much I like the sound.
>
> I do still have a case of 1/2" 456, but it's looking less and less like
it'll
> get used any time soon.
Even if digital resulted in exactly the same final product as tape, this
will at very least take good producers with 20 or 30 years of experience off
the job while they struggle with learning a new system. Some of them will
never make the transition -- good ears, not so bright with a mouse.
dtk
Mike Rivers
> Suddenly? The demise of vinyl might have been sudden, but the writing's
> been on the wall about the coming of digital for a couple of decades.
Oh, horseshit! There has been a steady base of analog studios all
along. True, many offer digital recording and some have moved entirely
to digital recording, but there's been no compelling need, nor any
indication that they would not have material to use.
Hydrogen cars are on the horizon, too. When are you going to give up
your gas guzzler?
> Now, we've dropped the ball, as we are *just now* getting to the point
> where we can take for granted things like accurate clocks and
> standardized lossless transfer interfaces, but the writing's been on the
> wall, and that stuff is coming late.
This is what I was suggesting when I said that the media was suddenly
been yanked away. Many users of analog media were not ready to make
the switch because they weren't happy with the results they could get
by going entirely to a digital system.
> People sandbagged instead of moving with the trend of technolog, and
> that includes studio owners as well as engineers and the people who
> finance them.
It's the hardware developers who develop the digital hardware. It's
the studio users who buy the tape. Why should a studio owner move to
an inferior sounding system and hope that some day the quality comes
back up to his standards? Pro Tools HD might be there now, but that's
a pretty expensive investment for a business that's running at the
marginal-profit level. And it's only been around for less than two
years. And its predecessor had only been around for five years or
less. How does someone who has been using the same analog recorder for
20 years relate to this from a business investment standpoint? He has
to be convinced that if he plunks down another $25K for a system to
replace his trusted analog recorder, his sustainment costs won't take
a big leap because the manufacturer decides in two years that there
will be no more support for his hardware and he has to replace it or
be left in the cold next time he has a problem.
Nor will a studio that's based its reputation on its sound be willing
to switch to a $2000 perpetually interim DAW.
> The whole revelation that analog tape involved killing whales did it for
> me. I say yank it away with prejudice.
That's a rather silly argument against analog tape.
> > People scream bloody murder when a hardware or software product is
> > discontinued. Eventually they make an adjustment, but it doesn't
> > happen overnight.
>
> Well, when a whole *industry* is discontinued, they usually do more than
> just scream bloody murder. They do stuff like litigate, and corner
> markets.
OK, so where's the litigation to get analog tape manufacturers back in
business? Sure, we saw them drop away, but you'd think that this would
strengthen the one remaining company that had the monopoly. So what's
their problem? We don't know because we don't have accesss to their
books.
> You know, the day crude oil becomes unavailable, I imagine people will
> be complaining how their whole supply was "yanked away from them
> suddenly."
Think about digital television. They were going to yank away analog
broadcasting last year, but they didn't. Too many people didn't want
to buy new TV sets so they could watch Oprah. Unfortunately the
recording industry doesn't have that much clout.
hank alrich
> Geoff Wood wrote:
> > Compresion with artifacts (maybe as yet unquantified) that for some reason
> > sound nice. Nothing to do with euphoniums, necessarily.
> The "some reason" is at least partly, continuity in the harmonics, and
> the characteristics of digital devices that lead to a high proportion of
> odd-ordered harmonics.
Cite?
--
ha
hank alrich
> You know, the day crude oil becomes unavailable, I imagine people will
> be complaining how their whole supply was "yanked away from them
> suddenly." They will have had centuries to prepare, and while there
> might be sympathy for those who procrastinate, there will also be
> success for those who did not.
The whole of the Petroleum Age will not last centuries; it'll be about
150 years, end-to-end, and the downside of the curve will be much
steeper than was the upside, given the skyrocketing demand for crude oil
as formerly undeveloped nations race to get their own hot tubs.
As for success coming from foresight, the world will go from 6+ billion
humans back to aproximately 2 billion, in keeping with the human
population sustainable on an Earth without oil.
--
ha
james of tucson
> We should all demand real cane sugar back.
I get that easily in Louisiana, as well as the real molasses
I use in my secret barbeque sauce.
james of tucson
> Oh boy, here we go again! This is simply not true.
Arny, I'm on your side of this argument. Digital recording should have
made tape obsolete ten years ago. The people on the supply side of the
technology have dragged their feet so that we are only just now getting
good converters and clocks.
> It's sad when people set them up as critics of technology that they
> obviously don't understand.
I still say it's expensive and complicated to simulate tube gain and
tape saturation. I think I understand parts of the reasons also.
Instead of throwing a brick at me, why don't you explain what I've got
wrong?
james of tucson
> Banks don't have a problem with that. And they are pretty mean.
Bank products are usually inherently valuable, unlike stuff like radio
transcriptions, tv jingles, data from space missions, unused alternate
takes, etc.
The attitude that media could just stay put, neglected in a warehouse
is why we have lost some of the greatest works of the golden age of
Hollywood, why much of the source material that Shakespeare drew from
is known only by a vague idea that it once existed, and why my almost
complete collection of Marvel Comics from 1969 to 1979 went up in smoke.
james of tucson
>> Suddenly? The demise of vinyl might have been sudden, but the writing's
>> been on the wall about the coming of digital for a couple of decades.
>
> Oh, horseshit! There has been a steady base of analog studios all
> along. True, many offer digital recording and some have moved entirely
> to digital recording, but there's been no compelling need, nor any
> indication that they would not have material to use.
There is now. If my business depended on a resource with a single
supply, I'm sure I'd be investing in that supplier. None of these
studios had the clout or the presence of forethought to become a major
stakeholder in Quantegy? Nobody had a colleague with a seat on the
board? The decision to shut down should not have come as a surprise,
to big industry professionals, that's part of what I'm saying.
> Hydrogen cars are on the horizon, too. When are you going to give up
> your gas guzzler?
Interesting question. My state offers a subsantial tax incentive for
alternative energy use, including converted/hybrid cars, solar heating,
etc. I have a solar water heater. When I travel on business I always
rent a Prius. I'm too happy with my 90's model Volvo to give it up, but
when I do, I'm sure I won't buy a gas guzzler.
>
>> Now, we've dropped the ball, as we are *just now* getting to the point
>> where we can take for granted things like accurate clocks and
>> standardized lossless transfer interfaces, but the writing's been on the
>> wall, and that stuff is coming late.
>
> This is what I was suggesting when I said that the media was suddenly
> been yanked away. Many users of analog media were not ready to make
> the switch because they weren't happy with the results they could get
> by going entirely to a digital system.
Now, there are people who argue that digital systems don't render
sufficient quality to justify switching from analog. There are others
who claim that's a load of crap. So 2" tape is more expensive now, and
that means some people will have to apply more critical logic to support
these claims, because there is a stronger business incentive to do so.
>> People sandbagged instead of moving with the trend of technolog, and
>> that includes studio owners as well as engineers and the people who
>> finance them.
>
> It's the hardware developers who develop the digital hardware. It's
> the studio users who buy the tape. Why should a studio owner move to
> an inferior sounding system and hope that some day the quality comes
> back up to his standards?
Wait, nobody is an island. Where in the rule book does it say these two
shouldn't have some sort of synergy, some sort of direct
producer/consumer relationship? The studio user *is* partly responsible
for the slow ascent of quality gear. You're the driver of the process,
and you shouldn't have taken the attitude that, well, analog tape will
always be cheap and will be available forever, so I'll just keep these
blinders on, and I'll just continue to assert that 24-bit audio isn't
as good as my tape machine.
> Pro Tools HD might be there now, but that's
> a pretty expensive investment for a business that's running at the
> marginal-profit level.
Protools is the best solution for technical, or for business reasons?
Seriously, what's the deal here? If DAW systems aren't there yet, the
demand side of the curve shares the responsibility.
We need to stop trying to press general purpose computer systems like
PC's and Mac's into service for DAW. We need vertical solutions,
something that fits in the form factor of a recording console, that has
controls like a console, everything but the tape transport. Why isn't
there a demand for this kind of thing?
> How does someone who has been using the same analog recorder for
> 20 years relate to this from a business investment standpoint?
Well, ten years ago, he might have taken some of his R&D budget and
invested in R&D for the next generation.
> He has
> to be convinced that if he plunks down another $25K for a system to
> replace his trusted analog recorder, his sustainment costs won't take
> a big leap because the manufacturer decides in two years that there
> will be no more support for his hardware and he has to replace it or
> be left in the cold next time he has a problem.
Yes, I agree with that point entirely. The economics don't work because
we are still waiting for the kind of systems that will have durable
utility. Even the most dedicated pro systems seem to be built with
consumer general purpose components. A fancy control surface plugged
into a Macintosh is nothing but a simulation of what you should have by
now.
> Nor will a studio that's based its reputation on its sound be willing
> to switch to a $2000 perpetually interim DAW.
Right, for lots of reasons -- proper change management requires a longer
evaluation period than the life expectancy of some of the equipment!
>> The whole revelation that analog tape involved killing whales did it for
>> me. I say yank it away with prejudice.
> That's a rather silly argument against analog tape.
I can't support any industry that supports whaling. I'd kill you to
save a whale.
>> > People scream bloody murder when a hardware or software product is
>> > discontinued. Eventually they make an adjustment, but it doesn't
>> > happen overnight.
>>
>> Well, when a whole *industry* is discontinued, they usually do more than
>> just scream bloody murder. They do stuff like litigate, and corner
>> markets.
>
> OK, so where's the litigation to get analog tape manufacturers back in
> business?
No, not to get them back in business! More like, a desperate attempt to
compensate for their failed business model! Look at what SCO has been
doing for the past year or so. That sort of litigation isn't meant to
put SCO back in business, it's more a desperate ploy to make sure the
execs can retire on the ashes of the company. I didn't mean to suggest
the litigation would be meant to benefit you.
> Sure we saw them drop away, but you'd think that this would
> strengthen the one remaining company that had the monopoly. So what's
> their problem? We don't know because we don't have accesss to their
> books.
Anyone whose large business relied entirely on this one company, should
have had enough of a vested interest in that company, that they held
preferred stock, or even had a strong association with one of the
directors. You *should* have access to their books. Obviously not small
time operators like you. But it doesn't sound like Capitol or Vivendi
or RCA or Sony or Disney did either. That's a mistake. Any of these
companies could have propped up Quantegy lock stock and barrel with
spare change, could have done it quietly, and we wouldn't be having this
discussion.
>> You know, the day crude oil becomes unavailable, I imagine people will
>> be complaining how their whole supply was "yanked away from them
>> suddenly."
> Think about digital television. They were going to yank away analog
> broadcasting last year, but they didn't. Too many people didn't want
> to buy new TV sets so they could watch Oprah. Unfortunately the
> recording industry doesn't have that much clout.
Frontal nudity (not Oprah!) is all it would take to make that happen.
Scott Dorsey
>On 2005-01-13, Mike Rivers <mri...@d-and-d.com> wrote:
>
>> They have the equipment,
>> they have the money, all they need is the tape. They didn't expect
>> that to be yanked away from them suddenly.
>
>Suddenly? The demise of vinyl might have been sudden, but the writing's
>been on the wall about the coming of digital for a couple of decades.
What demise of vinyl? I have cutting jobs booked up about three weeks
in advance right now.
--scott
Scott Dorsey
>On 12 Jan 2005 19:36:44 -0500, klu...@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) wrote:
>
>>...
>
>>Georges Collinais even plays a 78 now and then.
>
> Who is that? I googled the web, and the ONLY reference I found is
>where you mention his name in a post last summer, archived on one of
>these Usenet-ripoff websites:
I probably spelled it wrong. He's the host of AFROPOP WORLDWIDE, which
around here airs on Friday nights with a great mix of pop music from places
around the world with African roots.
Jay Kadis
wrote:
Georges Collinet
www.afropop.org
-Jay
--
x------- Jay Kadis ------- x---- Jay's Attic Studio ------x
x Lecturer, Audio Engineer x Dexter Records x
x CCRMA, Stanford University x http://www.offbeats.com/ x
x---------- http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jay/ ------------x
Kurt Albershardt
> Ben Bradley <ben_nospa...@mindspring.com> wrote:
>
>> On 12 Jan 2005 19:36:44 -0500, klu...@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) wrote:
>>
>>> Georges Collinais even plays a 78 now and then.
>>
>> Who is that? I googled the web, and the ONLY reference I found is
>> where you mention his name in a post last summer, archived on one of
>> these Usenet-ripoff websites:
>
>
> I probably spelled it wrong. He's the host of AFROPOP WORLDWIDE, which
> around here airs on Friday nights with a great mix of pop music from places
> around the world with African roots.
Georges Collinet <http://afropop.org/>
It's really one of the best syndicated shows on public radio.
this]@ri.htnet.hr Edi Zubovic
<fish...@radagast.home.conservatory.com> wrote:
-----------------8<------------------------
>
>Arny, I'm on your side of this argument. Digital recording should have
>made tape obsolete ten years ago. The people on the supply side of the
>technology have dragged their feet so that we are only just now getting
>good converters and clocks.
>
I was just thinking to myself -- if some technologies hadn't been put
aside after the onset of "new and revolutionary" technologies, who
knows where such parallel developments could lead to? For example,
using the latest stand of research and technics, how would today a
tape recorder and tape material look -- if they have been developed at
a pace of, say, a hard disk and other computer products, with latest
electronics etc.? -- Oh, just a thought, not of importance.
I have a book about video recorders, how much effort has been put at
Ampex to make a viable recording and reproduction of video material.
Magnifficient. Motors with air bearings, suction-assisted tape
transport, advanced servo and sync systems, etc.
(Ray Dolby has been in a development team and there has been a "Bing
Crosby System" -- _that_ Bing? :)
Edi Zubovic, Crikvenica, Croatia
PS. Nowadays, there are problems in reproduction of really old video
recordings. They are still playable though. So I think, if a recording
of a bandwidth in a magnitude of megahertz and more can be still
reproduced, I give audio tapes a long go provided that they are
physically and chemically stable and stored properly -- and by no
means zapped.
Logan Shaw
> In article <gn4eu096s7s7umn2b...@4ax.com> play...@comcast.net writes:
>
>
>>>But a CD-R is pretty useless without a CD player. My money is on there
>>>not being any CD players 300 years (and small money on 100 years) from
>>>now, and there won't be because the archivists haven't preserved the
>>>documentation well enough to know how to build one.
>>
>>This seems to be a silly argument. Do you think there will be Studer
>>24 track machines in working condition 300 years from now?
>
>
> Of course not, but there will be lathes and amplifiers and soldering
> irons. How easy is it to build a CD player and figure out how to put
> the bits in some useful form to produce audio?
It might be easier than building a tape machine! First of all,
for a tape machine, you've got to have a tape head. That is not
the easiest thing in the world to build. There are lots of physics
involved.
With a CD, the pits should be visible with a microscope. It won't
take long to realize that they're arranged in one great big spiral.
Next step is to figure out which end of the spiral is the start
and which is the end. That's not hard -- if you look at 3 or 4
different CDs in the light, you'll see that you can tell which part
of the disc has info on it and which doesn't, and that the info
always reaches the inner edge but not the outer. Therefore, it
either starts in the middle or is a seriously brain-damaged format.
Now, once you've done that, you've identified what the stream of
bits is, and the next task is to read it off. That's a bit
trickier. In theory, if you can see them with a microscope, you
can read them. But I don't want to read 5 billion bits by
hand, and neither does anyone else. So, I will posit that by
the year 2305, they'll have some kind of microscope or scanner
or something somewhere in a lab that can take a 10000 dpi image
(or whatever it takes) of a 5" disc and save it to a really big
honkin bitmap file.
Once you have this gigantic bitmap file, you can write software
to recognize the spiral pattern of the bits and extra the bits.
Now, at this point you have a big stream of bits, so how do you
decode it? Well, I don't know the specifics of the CD audio
format, although I do know that in vague terms it's pretty
simple as formats go. However, what I do know is that in
WWII, the Germans used Enigma machines to encrypt communications
prior to transmitting them by radio, and an team of mathematicians
managed to break some of the codes and decrypt the communications
without the help of the general purpose computers! So, figuring
out which bits are the most significant and least significant
in PCM encoding is not likely to be an insurmountable task for
the archeologists of the future.
To me, this is somewhat about perspective. I think it's easy
to make sense of a stream of bits because I have a computer
science degree. Someone who designs and works with analog
electronics probably thinks it's easier to build a machine to
read reel-to-reel tapes. My guess is that in the future, there
will be no shortage of people who know about computers, but
there probably also won't be a shortage of people who know
about electronics and magnetism either.
By the way, if you *really* want your digital audio data to
stay around a long time, get a 600 dpi laser printer and print
out each bit as a square that is 0.01 inches on a side. Make
dark 0 and light 1. If you do this, you can fit about 100
kilobytes on each side of a page. If you print on both sides,
you can fit 200 MB per 1000 sheets of paper. So, the media
costs are about $15 (plus toner!) to encode an audio CD.
- Logan
Aaron J. Grier
> By the way, if you *really* want your digital audio data to stay
> around a long time, get a 600 dpi laser printer and print out each bit
> as a square that is 0.01 inches on a side. Make dark 0 and light 1.
> If you do this, you can fit about 100 kilobytes on each side of a
> page. If you print on both sides, you can fit 200 MB per 1000 sheets
> of paper. So, the media costs are about $15 (plus toner!) to encode
> an audio CD.
physical imprint of pigmented ink via offset or letter press would be
even better; toner seems prone to "drop outs", but that may just be the
result of early laser printers which didn't fuse at sufficient high
heat.
this would be a nifty project, though. I wonder what kind of error
correcting codes would work the best for this application?
--
Aaron J. Grier | "Not your ordinary poofy goof." | agr...@poofygoof.com
The United States is the one true country. The US is just. The US
is fair. The US respects its citizens. The US loves you. We have
always been at war against terrorism.
dt king
news:PqWFd.6795$_56....@fe2.texas.rr.com...
> By the way, if you *really* want your digital audio data to
> stay around a long time, get a 600 dpi laser printer and print
> out each bit as a square that is 0.01 inches on a side. Make
> dark 0 and light 1. If you do this, you can fit about 100
> kilobytes on each side of a page. If you print on both sides,
> you can fit 200 MB per 1000 sheets of paper. So, the media
> costs are about $15 (plus toner!) to encode an audio CD.
We laugh, but the film used for the early Edison movies disintegrated years
ago. The only reason we have them available as MPEGs on loc.gov is because
they originally printed each frame and bound them in books so they'd be
covered by the copyright laws of that time.
If you really want your music to last a long time, encoded it in a genetic
sequence and integrate it into the gene pool of a flock of crows. It'll
still be floating around long after the last humans have passed on and
clever aliens will be amused when they find it -- along with later Monsanto
trademarks -- in dna surveys.
dtk
Jay Kadis
wrote:
[snip]
>
> If you really want your music to last a long time, encoded it in a genetic
> sequence and integrate it into the gene pool of a flock of crows. It'll
> still be floating around long after the last humans have passed on and
> clever aliens will be amused when they find it -- along with later Monsanto
> trademarks -- in dna surveys.
>
> dtk
>
>
By the time you read the DNA, it will bear little resemblance to the sequences
that were originally introduced. DNA is unstable and must undergo constant
error detection and correction just like digital audio.
Mike Rivers
> There is now. If my business depended on a resource with a single
> supply, I'm sure I'd be investing in that supplier. None of these
> studios had the clout or the presence of forethought to become a major
> stakeholder in Quantegy?
They barely have the resoruces to be major stockholders in their own
companies. At least Mike Spitz (ATR Service) thought about it.
Thing is that the studios who use analog tape are, in essence,
investing in the manufacture by continuing to buy it. It's a smaller
market than ever, but they aren't in a position to recognize that the
supply would go away without clear warning, not just the fuzzy "well,
we only ordered 20% of the tape this year than we did last year." And
some studios still track almost exclusive to tape, so their usage
never really dropped.
And it's not like analog tape manufacturing technology is being
abandoned - they're still making casette tape and video tape, it's
just that there was only one plant still coating with the oxides used
for studio grade audio tape and slitting into studio recorder widths.
So the ability to make it is still there, it was just a business
decision to shut down what was coincidentally the last plant to make
tape for recording studios.
> Now, there are people who argue that digital systems don't render
> sufficient quality to justify switching from analog. There are others
> who claim that's a load of crap.
I'll stand in between, but I don't do enough business to care one way
or another. I still have 1/4" machines, but I gave up my 2" machine a
few years ago - not because it was a dinosaur, but because I was
hardly doing any multitrack sessions (and not because of the tape
cost, because I just wasn't interested). I now have a Mackie hard disk
recorder that I use for multitrack and I find it to be totally
satisfactory. I can bumble my way through using my computer as a
multitrack recorder, but it's not neearly as easy to use as either
dedicated recorder (the Ampex or the Mackie). If I was doing a lot of
multitrack work, it would be on the Mackie, not on a computer. But
that's just my old fart ergonomic preference.
> So 2" tape is more expensive now, and
> that means some people will have to apply more critical logic to support
> these claims, because there is a stronger business incentive to do so.
Prices go up and up. Applying business logic, if a studio sold their
$25,000 2" recorder for $2,500 and then bought a ProTools system for
$25,000, I'd expect rates to go up to cover that new investment that
will take a few years to amortize. (though some people will tell you
that it paid for itself in three sessions) The reality is that rates
don't go up because the clients will go elsewhere, and in fact,
profits go down because the studio is no longer making a little on the
sale of tape. The only saving grace is that clients tend to spend more
time fiddling with the tracks because they can.
> > It's the hardware developers who develop the digital hardware. It's
> > the studio users who buy the tape. Why should a studio owner move to
> > an inferior sounding system and hope that some day the quality comes
> > back up to his standards?
>
> Wait, nobody is an island. Where in the rule book does it say these two
> shouldn't have some sort of synergy, some sort of direct
> producer/consumer relationship? The studio user *is* partly responsible
> for the slow ascent of quality gear. You're the driver of the process,
> and you shouldn't have taken the attitude that, well, analog tape will
> always be cheap and will be available forever, so I'll just keep these
> blinders on, and I'll just continue to assert that 24-bit audio isn't
> as good as my tape machine.
In fact, the studios HAVE driven the improvements in professional
digital audio gear. But it comes slowly because the manufacturers with
all the money are busy turning out crap for the mass market. Little
guys like Dave Hill, Glen Zelniker, Dan Lavry, and, yeah, the ProTools
guys (who dragged their feet on the serious hardware for a couple of
years so they could make 001s, 002s, and M-boxes) are coming along,
but not every studio can buy new major cost gear every few years, and
that's the history of digital audio. A 2" analog multitrack recorder
for most studios was a long term investment. They might get 10-15
years of service out of it with, for the most part, just in-house
maintenance, maybe a head refurbishment and a new motor once in a
lifetime. But I'll be Digidesign will have all the ProTools HD owners
re-investing in another few years. It's what they (Digidesign) has to
do in order to stay in business.
> Protools is the best solution for technical, or for business reasons?
> Seriously, what's the deal here? If DAW systems aren't there yet, the
> demand side of the curve shares the responsibility.
It's the best solution for business reasons. That's what the clients
ask for. There are hardly any major projects that don't see ProTools
at some point in the process, but there are still a lot of engineers,
producers, and clients who like to track on analog tape (for various
reasons) and then transfer the project to ProTools for overdubs,
processing, editing and fixing. And many still like to mix through an
analog console, using the ProTools system as if it was a multitrack
recorder playing back. So there's still a demand for both, though it
has shifted toward the ProTools side recently. Part of that blame has
to go to the studio. They used to say "I now have 24 tracks, so the
rate has gone up." Today, they can't get away with that. People expect
"I not have ProTools so the rate is going down."
> We need to stop trying to press general purpose computer systems like
> PC's and Mac's into service for DAW. We need vertical solutions,
> something that fits in the form factor of a recording console, that has
> controls like a console, everything but the tape transport. Why isn't
> there a demand for this kind of thing?
There is, some, but it's going to be more expensive than a general
purpose computer and some specialized hardware and software. The cost
saving (for the manufacturer - and the unexpected cost for the buyer)
is in system integration. The market for the vertically integrated
systems remains with the desktop singer/songwriter and occasional
serious producer. There are good products like this from Korg and
Roland, for instance. Tascam tried it and flopped, but that was
because it was essentially a 16-track hard disk recorder, MIDI
sequencer, and console built into a single unit, for something over
ten grand. Too small for the big guys and too big for the small guys.
They're having more success with their smaller Portastudio line.
Fairlight has a seriously professional system, but a studio that
already has a console that they and their clients like and really only
needs to replace the recorder isn't going to buy that. It's a special
purpose system that needs its own room. They might buy one for the B
or C room, but not to replace the SSL and Studer. A suitable
replacement for the Studer is something like the RADAR with the
S-Nyquist converters, but that's $16K or so (admittedly about half the
cost of a new Studer analog). The Mackie HDR24/96 is great to use with
a nice console, but no studio who built their reputation on the sound
of their analog recorder is going to be able to sell that to their
clients.
> > How does someone who has been using the same analog recorder for
> > 20 years relate to this from a business investment standpoint?
>
> Well, ten years ago, he might have taken some of his R&D budget and
> invested in R&D for the next generation.
Studios typically don't have R&D budgets. They're users, not
developers.
> The economics don't work because
> we are still waiting for the kind of systems that will have durable
> utility. Even the most dedicated pro systems seem to be built with
> consumer general purpose components. A fancy control surface plugged
> into a Macintosh is nothing but a simulation of what you should have by
> now.
And while we're waiting, some would rather continue to maintain our
status quo rather than jump from system to system every few years
until we retire.
> Right, for lots of reasons -- proper change management requires a longer
> evaluation period than the life expectancy of some of the equipment!
I don't know that anyone expected their analog recorders to last 20
years, but whenever something came along that looked like it might be
better, those who dragged their feet for a couple of years to see if
this newfangled digital recorder/editor thing would catch on saw it
replaced by a different version before they could learn much about it.
> No, not to get them back in business! More like, a desperate attempt to
> compensate for their failed business model! Look at what SCO has been
> doing for the past year or so. That sort of litigation isn't meant to
> put SCO back in business, it's more a desperate ploy to make sure the
> execs can retire on the ashes of the company. I didn't mean to suggest
> the litigation would be meant to benefit you.
Oh.
> Anyone whose large business relied entirely on this one company, should
> have had enough of a vested interest in that company, that they held
> preferred stock, or even had a strong association with one of the
> directors.
Maybe two or three of the largest studios were in the position to do
something like that, but what could I do with 50 shares of Quantegy.
I'm not even sure it's a publicly traded company. It never occurred to
me to look.
> Obviously not small
> time operators like you. But it doesn't sound like Capitol or Vivendi
> or RCA or Sony or Disney did either.
I don't think that RCA, Sony, or Disney are suffering from the loss of
tape because they can control their own studios and the studios they
hire for outside production. It's the smaller or mid-level studios
that are hurting. Sure, you can say it would have been smart for them
to drop this silly music recording which is marginally profitable and
start producing music for web sites or multimedia entertainment or
industrial video sound tracks, but someone who got into the studio
business because of his love of music (and most of us did) aren't
going to be happy making a living like that. And in fact, some have
left the studio business and are happily doing IT system integration
or selling cars.
> > Think about digital television. They were going to yank away analog
> > broadcasting last year, but they didn't.
> Frontal nudity (not Oprah!) is all it would take to make that happen.
We have to get over the "wardrobe malfunction" syndrome first.
Ben Bradley
wrote:
>Scott Dorsey wrote:
>> Ben Bradley <ben_nospa...@mindspring.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On 12 Jan 2005 19:36:44 -0500, klu...@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) wrote:
>>>
>>>> Georges Collinais even plays a 78 now and then.
>>>
>>> Who is that? I googled the web, and the ONLY reference I found is
>>> where you mention his name in a post last summer, archived on one of
>>> these Usenet-ripoff websites:
>>
>>
>> I probably spelled it wrong. He's the host of AFROPOP WORLDWIDE, which
>> around here airs on Friday nights with a great mix of pop music from places
>> around the world with African roots.
ISTR hearing the name of that show, perhaps when I lived on Long
Island, or eariler in Atlanta before. Regardless, WABE doesn't
currently carry it.
>
>
>Georges Collinet <http://afropop.org/>
>
>
>It's really one of the best syndicated shows on public radio.
I enjoyed the 'free listens.'